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Neither Appearance nor Illusion

Neither Appearance nor Illusion was an installation in the Musée du Louvre of the 12th century remains of the original fortress built to protect Paris from Anglo-Norman threat. The foundations were revealed during the archaeological renovations of the Grand Louvre in 1989. This installation marked the first time this particular space had been used to display art.

The work installed a text piece high above the walkway around these medieval walls. In reading the work, the viewer is guided around the Louvre’s medieval moats, the old walls of the ramparts, the Dungeon, and the Saint-Louis Room. The text invites spectators to discover this mysterious subterranean space, shrouded by the present-day museum.

The title ‘Neither Appearance nor Illusion’ is from Friedrich Nietzsche. However, this is the first work in which I have used my own writing as the basis for the neon literary fragments, and cast the writer as a speaker with a subjective presence. The piece is composed of fifteen sentences written originally for an Internet project that restricted the numbers of characters within the sentences. They became the literary template, which I adapted from notes I took when I first visited this medieval space. The spatial limitations of that original writing task aided the limitations within this exhibition space, and helped map the configuration of the neon display on the foundations’ walls. ‘I’ asserts itself from the beginning ‘I’m facing a 12th Century Stone Wall,’ and moves on to signify collective experience, ‘We follow the passage along the wall’. This installation juxtaposes the architecture of one end of the millennium with that of the other, where centuries-old stones are illuminated with neon lights, a symbol of modernity.

The exhibition was accompanied by a major catalogue published by the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and MER, Gand [ISBN 978-2-35031-277-4].